Trent Schroyer

Trent Schroyer born May 23, 1936 is an American scholar, author and international activist. Studying and then teaching at the Graduate Faculty of the New School. His first book ‘The Critique of Domination: The Origins and Development of Critical Theory’ was nominated for a National Book Award. He was active in diffusing the Critical Theory to many colleges and Universities. Later teaching at Ramapo College of N.J. he focused on promoting Sustainability. As Chair of The Other Economic Summit (TOES) he was an international organizer and writer about neoliberal globalization and its alternatives. Later organizing trips to South India and the Aegean islands he focused on regenerative alternatives to westernizing development and resistance to authoritarianisms.

Origins and Personal Life

Trent Schroyer is a seventh-generation member of a mountain farm family from Wolfsville, Maryland. Learning subsistence skills and nature lore, he became a naturalist in a regional boy scout camp. These interests later became part-time occupations of college nature tours and guided wilderness trips. Love of nature was his first orientation in the world.

Education

At Antioch College in Ohio, he studied physics, geology and working in work-study coop-jobs at Kettering Institute for Photosynthesis. As lab assistant to C.F. Kettering, the last great American inventor with 186 major patents, he was impressed by a radical common-sense approach to learning. Kettering demonstrated that over literal theory was a detriment to contextual innovations. An over literal affirmation of theory applications as reality implies an existential principal - ‘stop seeing what you believe and start believing what you see.'

thumb Attending the University of Edinburgh to study physics in his junior year Schroyer encountered excellent philosophy classes. John McMurray’s overview of western ethics and moral practices was excellent. Returning to Antioch he graduated in Philosophy in 1959.

[1]

Graduate School

Winning a Fellowship to study philosophy at Johns Hopkins he became fascinated with the study of philosophies of history. Transferred to the Graduate Faculty of the New School [2] which was presided over by the refugees from Nazi Germany – such as Hannah Arendt. These refugees from Nazi Germany communicated a sense of the tragedy of living in a fascist ethos that was unforgettable and implies democratization practices relative to 21st century authoritarianisms.

Visiting scholars Jürgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel had reflected on Nazi Germany by creating different versions of a communicative ethics that has much relevance for policy and critical practice.

Schroyer received a PhD from the Graduate Faculty of the New School. His dissertation ‘Alienation and the Dialectical Paradigm’ focused on the historical creation of a critical science and philosophy.

Teaching Critical Theory at the Graduate Faculty

In 1969, Schroyer was asked to join the Graduate Faculty of the New School and taught critical theory and published ‘The Critique of Domination: The Origins and Development of Critical Theory’ - which was nominated for a National Book Award in Philosophy and Religion.

Learning critical theory from Jürgen Habermas was transformative; his linguistic foundation for a communications theory of society was seminal. The implications of discourse ethics were the basis for later writings and organizing of political publics.

As editor of Telos magazine, Schroyer helped get critical theory diffused more broadly. But after an extended research in the spin offs of the new left, the editorial board declined to open a new communications section documenting these innovations – Schroyer dropped out of the journal.

Ramapo College and Sustainability of the Earth

Schroyer was appointed Professor of Sociology-Philosophy in the School of Environmental Studies at [3] Ramapo College in N.J in 1973. Ramapo’s mission included global education and provided support for the many international associations such as the Earth Summit in 1992, and events related to The Other Economic Summit.

Innovating political public formations, Schroyer organized six semester long lecture series at Ramapo college creating discourse about ‘Ecological Futures', 'Counter Movements in Science', 'Authoritarianism or Democratization', 'Thinking Globally- Acting Locally, Promises of the Earth Summit', and 'World Sustainability’, as well as a later symposium on 'The Relevance of Gandhi After 9/11.

International Organizing – TOES The Other Economic Summit – [4]

The G-7 was not mandated under the United Nations system; it was a club of the rich nations who presumed their interest was the global interest. TOES emerged because the G-7 countries since 1975 became a top-down globalizing development force with no accountability. Schroyer was the overall program coordinator for ‘The Other Economic Summit’ (TOES) in Houston Texas in 1990 and later replaced Ward Morehouse as Chair for Denver, Colorado in 1997 and TOES Brunswick, Georgia in 2004. The uniqueness of TOES is that it re-emerged each year as an expanding network of networks, relinked and reinterpreted by volunteers from each the host countries. After the G-7 meeting in Denver Schroyer helped form, with Stephen Marglin, Professor of Economics at Harvard, an Economic Visions group that influenced the future of TOES.

TOES mission was to bring together public forums of thinkers and doers who dissented from G-7 policies and spotlighted alternatives to this undemocratic economic authoritarianism. The unaccountable power of the G-7 nations aided a "globalization" dynamic where the transnational corporations became more and more the movers that imposed their agendas of profit, cheap labor and land privatizations. Bringing spokespersons and networks of non-governmental organizations (NGO's) together, TOES became the central counter-G-7 forum. The 1990 and 1997 TOES each had over 70 panels and plenaries and brought in thousands of people and major media coverages. The World Social Forums emerged later would continue these world public formations.

From the beginning of the U.N. Earth Summits corporations have been present at every meeting and succeeded in putting ‘development’ into the center of every public statement and procedures, essentially implanting a colonizing ideology. Expansions of corporate power globally have, in many places undermined habitation and governance in the third world and in the west too – all the while enriching millions. Ultimately it has eroded the concept of public services, and maintenance of commons arrangements, as a concern of governance. These internal colonizations of social-cultural worlds returned to the U.S. in the last decades. Schroyer’s books include critical discourse of corporate ‘sustainable development’ and documentation of real sustainability practices. They also document the regenerations of intrinsic capacities of unique ecologies and cultures.

The History of Scarcity: Consequences and Planetary Costs of Globalization Schroyer adopted an alternative interpretation of these historical realities from Karl Polanyi’s critique of Karl Marx’s theory of the source of human misery. Polanyi asserts that “The disintegration of the cultural environment of the victim is the cause of degradation, not economic exploitation”. (‘The Great Transformation’)

Undermining socio-cultural institutions subordinates them to the logics of wider market forces. Of course, economic exploitation exists and the powerful will impose it. Polanyi derives this hypothesis from his analysis of how the new social technologies of classical economics were applied to aggressively destroy subsistence capacities in England and the colonies. Once the concept of scarcity is central to economic theory it becomes much easier to imagine the human situation as dependent upon "nature-like" economic forces and to impose wider wage-labor regimes upon livelihood centered habitation.

Ivan Illich uses Polanyi’s view to form a prophetic hypothesis about the history of the west as a 500-year war on subsistence - the history of scarcity. Scarcity is the condition that justifies the dis-valuing of all traditional socio-cultural forms. The hierarchies and hollowing out of political capacities and creation of social scarcity results in the collapse of social bonds that create loneliness and isolation. This also applies to the conditions leading to the 2016 U.S. election. As a participant in Ivan Illich's retreats in Germany, Penn State, and Oakland, Calif. that focused on dimensions of the history of scarcity Schroyer benefited from the wisdom of Wolfgang Sachs, David Cayley, Frederique Apffel-Marglin, Jean Robert, et al.

Discovery and Discourse in India

As a member of International Network for Cultural Alternatives to Development a non-governmental, international solidarity organization based in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.), Schroyer helped facilitate gatherings of indigenous leaders in Quebec and south-east Asia. At the Bangalore, India conference in 2000, Siddhartha, from Fireflies Ashram, invited him to bring activists, scholars and students to India to encounter grassroots actions and models for alternatives in south India. From this beginning in 2000 Schroyer founded the Ramapo India semester study abroad program. In 2004 Schroyer brought Ramapo students and activists to the World Social ForumWorld Social Forum, in Mumbai, built around the slogan 'Another World is Possible'.

At Fireflies Ashram, participants engaged in public dialogues about transformative innovations in India such as the ongoing Gandhian legacy, commons actions, alternative economics and inter-religious discourse. Participation in these discourses and visits to many communities revealed that encountering people in their own worlds changes perceptions and structures of feeling. These encounters were expressed in the following presentations: -Schroyer gave a talk 'On Economic Alternatives’ to the Indian Institute of Journalism & News Media (IIJNM), Bangalore, India (2008); -The Indian Institute of Science Campus, Bangalore, India (2008) on ‘The Fall of Western Certitudes and the Relevance of Ivan Illich’; -In March 31, presented paper on 'Compassion and Confrontation' at the University of Madras, Chennai, India. (2009)

Re-inhabitations on Ikaria Island, Greece

[5]About Ikaria Island, Greece

Tula Tsalis and Schroyer led three summer trips with students and activists down the Aegean islands from Lesvos, to Chios, to Samos, Ikaria and Patmos going from units of the University of the Aegean for introductions to Greek history and the problems of the islands. This was a background for work in Ikaria.

Schroyer and his wife, Tula Tsalis, returned to her birthplace for long summers; the incredible beauty of Ikaria Island and its culture is overwhelming. They helped start an Ikarian Regeneration Project as a response to the imposed ‘austerity’ programs on Greece and Ikaria island and investigated how Ikarian’s can protect their public assets (‘commons’), such as forests, water systems, and community solidarity. Realities of the island were interpreted in their participation in the International Commons Conference at the Heinrich Boll Foundation in Berlin Germany (2010) and Schroyer’s paper 'Beyond Western Economism' presented at the European Urban Anthropology Conference at the University of Peloponnese in Corinth, Greece (2010).

Participations in Civic Education in America

The dominate American institutions reinforce a destructive development mentality that sees all futures dependent upon more profit oriented economic growth and technological progress. The following are public discourses that raise questions challenging these disconnects from reality.

Globalization’s undermining of social bonds came home to the U.S. in the last decades. These consequences are denied by the right wing political narrative that the American identity is about ‘individual liberty’- and ‘big government’ blocks it. They helped create the Community Action Network (CAN)https://www.facebook.com/Community-Action-Network-of-Warwick-NY-1484128001627249/ in Warwick, N.Y. in November 2016 in respond to Donald Trump’s authoritarianism.

Shrinking the Constitution has been a Republican goal for many years. The forum on ‘Can We Save the Constitution or Can the Constitution Save Us’ in Middletown, N.Y. ( 2017) was to assess this threat to the Constitution. The forum argued that citizens should be prepared for a Constitutional crisis.

Pope Francis[6] proposed worldwide dialogues about the credibility of the progress narratives and advocates putting scientific knowledge and techno-economic development into the context of a wider Integral ecology. Schroyer joined this discourse in Ramapo College’s Symposium on Pope Francis’s Laudato Si whose discourse is convergent with some of Ivan IIlich’s views. (2015)

The first victim of endless war and development is peace and the Economics of Peace International Conference co-convened by the Praxis Peace Institute in '''Sonoma, California''' included Schroyer’s participation. (2009).

Books

  • The Critique of Domination: The Origins and Development of Critical Theory. Nominated for the 1973 National Book Award in Philosophy (translated into German and French). Beacon Press Paperback.
  • A World that Works: Building Blocks for a Just and Sustainable Society The Bootstrap Press, 1997 (Edited Anthology for TOES 1997)
  • Creating a Sustainable World: Past Experiences, Future Struggles edited by Trent Schroyer & Tom Golodik published by Apex Press 2006
  • Beyond Western Economics: Remembering Other Economic Cultures', (Routledge Press, 2009)

References

  1. ↑ wiki/The_New_School
  2. ↑ wiki/The_New_School
  3. ↑ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramapo_College
  4. ↑ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Other_Economic_Summit
  5. ↑ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icaria
  6. ↑ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Francis
  • Schroyer, Trent (1973). The Critique of Domination; The Origins and Development of Critical Theory. Beacon Press.
  • Schroyer, Trent (1997). A World that Works: Building Blocks for a Just and Sustainable Society. The Bootstrap Press.
  • Schroyer, Trent (2006). Creating a Sustainable World: Past Experiences and Future Struggles. Apex Press.
  • Schroyer, Trent (2009). Beyond Western Economism: Remembering Other Economic Cultures. Routledge Press.
  • The Critique of Domination; The Origins and Development of Critical Theory
  • World That Works Building Blocks for a Just & Sustainable Society TRENT SCHROYER
  • Creating a Sustainable World: Past Experience/ Future Struggle
  • xBeyond Western Economics: Remembering Other Economic Cultures (Economics as Social Theory)
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